Third Take

In August, Cakewalk was running a deal where if you bought or upgraded to Sonar 5, you would get a free upgrade to Sonar 6 when it came out. It’s out now, but I haven’t received my upgrade yet. I did some searching through the Cakewalk forums for information, and found this thread. Some people claim to have already received theirs, and it took no action on their part. I guess I’ll continue to be patient.

Cakewalk has started putting videos on YouTube about Sonar 6. One of the new features is a tool called AudioSnap that lets manipulate the timing of your audio and midi tracks – you can quantize drums to a guitar part, dynamically change your project tempo based on audio, and even change the rhythm and feel of audio tracks.

Today I got an E-MU Xboard 49 MIDI controller keyboard from zzounds. I picked this controller because it has driver support for Windows x64, according to Cakewalk. So far, I’m really impressed with the hardware, but I’m having trouble with the included soft synth.
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This is old news for most people, especially with Sonar 6 on the horizon, but there is a free update from Sonar 5.0.1 to Sonar 5.2. There is an update for XP and an update for XP x64. Be sure to get the right one for your OS.

If you have a MIDI drum track in your Sonar project, you can use a Drum Map to replace the piano keys in Piano Roll View with the names of the drum samples. Here are Drum Maps for Toontrack’s EZ Drummer – both the Standard Kit and the Cocktail Kit. You have to be logged in to toontrack.com for the link to work.